The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works

By Rares G. Piloiu

The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth's major works of fiction for the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth's challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological encounters with the real is an expression of Roth's belief that, since the self and the world are in a continuing state of crisis, issuing from their separation in modernity, a restoration of their unity is necessary to redeem the historical existence of individuals and communities alike. Piloiu notes, however, that Roth's enterprise in this is not unique to his work, but rather is shared by an entire generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals. This generation, disillusioned by modernity's excessive secularism, rationalism, and nationalism, sought a radical solution in the revival of mystical religious traditions-above all, in the Judaic idea of messianic redemption. Their use of the Chasidic notion of redemption was highly original in that it stripped the notion of its original theological meaning and applied it to the secular experience of reality. As a result, Roth's quest for redemption is a quest for a salvation of the individual not outside, but within, history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781612495507

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Introduction

The Judaic Dimension of Redemption

in Roth’s Work and a Brief Review of

the Relevant Secondary Literature

While much is known about Roth’s complex relationship with the Jewish identity and with Judaism, little is known about his connection with the intellectual universe of the Central European Jews who came of age in the first decades of the twentieth century and who, although raised in assimilated middle-class families, grew increasingly disenchanted with the secular, rationalist, and individualist project of assimilation adopted by the Jews in the nineteenth century. Unlike their parents, these intellectuals returned to traditional—particularly Eastern—Judaic spirituality in order to find solutions to the deadlocks of not only modern Jewish identity but also modern subjectivity in general. The generation’s reawakened interest in Judaism and Jewish issues even led Martin Buber to talk of a Jewish Renaissance in the first half of the twentieth century, as Paul Mendes-Flohr points out (German Jews 57). Although a heterogeneous group politically and intellectually, "their thinking took shape around the Jewish (Kabbalistic) idea of tikkun, a polysemic term for redemption (Erlösung), restoration, reparation, reformation and the recovery of lost harmony (Löwy 2). Michael Löwy refers to this generation as a generation of dreamers and utopians" that includes figures as diverse as Gustav Landauer, Franz Kafka, Gershom Scholem, Georg Lukács, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Toller, Ernst Bloch, Max Brod, and Leo Löwenthal. The present study articulates the nexus between Joseph Roth’s work and this generation’s preoccupation with the idea of redemption in order to demonstrate that Roth’s constant search for the restoration of a unified identity—individual or collective, Jewish or universal—is indebted to a rediscovered Judaic and, more specifically, Chasidic notion of redemption.

Placing Roth within a group of theoretical thinkers that included mostly philosophers but also theologians, sociologists, and literary critics is a bit problematic because of his avowed contempt for theory, especially for speculative thinking in the tradition of German idealist philosophy. Roth, the self-styled practical intellectual for whom writing was allegedly nothing more than a trade, preferred the company of like-minded people, including journalists, novelists, and historians. He avoided the theorists, intentionally overlooked their books, and in general did not appear to have too much time for lengthy speculations. In his busy, productive life Roth preferred the Latin clarity, the simple style, and the short and penetrating insight, so different from the German Dichtung tradition, and saw himself, in his critics’ words, as a one-off in German literature, as he declared in a 1927 letter to his French translator Félix Bertaux (Joseph Roth: A Life 105). Yet, Roth’s fiction and nonfiction alike use the guise of simplicity in order to arrive at a lofty, spiritual purpose. This purpose, rarely asserted as such, is hinted at throughout Roth’s entire work as the centerpiece around which revolve his social critique, his political convictions, his moral intuitions, and his meditations on history. It is the idea of redemption, which also attracted, albeit in a profoundly philosophical-speculative way, the other members of his generation. This intragenerational affinity for spiritual renovation, for a return to the religious roots of historical existence, and for the unification of the self and the world justifies Roth’s treatment alongside the other theorists of the idea of redemption.

This notion of redemption presents itself in Roth’s work as a solution to the profound crisis in which modernity—understood in a political, moral, and philosophical sense—plunged both the individual and society. Redemption promises the recovery of a long-forgotten meaningfulness by reuniting the religious and historical dimensions of existence, both in a private and communal sense. By revisiting the Judaic idea of salvation as a mystical conjunction of divine miraculous intervention and individual effort, Roth offers a counterbalance to the excessive reliance on human reason in defining the role of the individual in the modern world. At the same time, his view of redemption does not simply mark a return to the premodern ethos of collective religious traditions. It creates instead an original and unconventional way of thinking about restoring the lost unity with the world by imagining the inherited, collective traditions as a living organism that keeps itself open to the spontaneity of individual variations. In a world torn apart by the individualism of the liberal-bourgeois traditions and by the collectivism of the rising tide of ethic and social populisms, as the European world was in the interwar years, the political dimension of redemption sought to arrive at an almost impossible synthesis of individual and collective as well as particular and universal identities. It is probably for this reason that although first formulated in the Central European intra-Jewish debates about the projects of assimilation and nation building, the idea of redemption acquires in Roth’s work a universal character, reinforced by the belief that the historical experience of the Jews was not singular and instead was prototypical for the entirety of humankind.

Whether couched in the political concept of Utopia or considered in its moral-religious dimension, this particular idea of redemption is not the same as the Judaic idea of redemption and combines both religious and secular elements. Unlike traditional messianic thinking, it is not apocalyptical; that is, it does not promote a notion of redemption based on the obliteration of creation and the birth of an entirely new Kingdom of God. Instead, it is incorporated into creation in a manner that preserves its transcendent character but infuses it into history. In this manner, its secular, political, and moral aspects become an integral part of the redemptive process in which the humans play an active role. It is this notion of salvation in history and not outside of it that attracted both Roth and many of his contemporaries to the Chasidic idea of redemption and to Eastern Judaic spirituality in general. On the other hand, making redemption a historical event in which the individuals participate does not mean that salvation is a rational, planned, and guaranteed project. In that, it is different from what Northrop Frye calls a rational Utopia, one in which the mechanisms of salvation are rationally transparent, predictable, and clear.¹ To the contrary, its occurrence is sudden and unpredictable. It is primarily an event in the logic of the transcendent realm; its arrival is transformative because the world of history and creation is delivered through it from its corrupt condition. Thus, the religious, mystical character of redemption is preserved. The individual, however much involved in the fashioning of one’s own salvation in history, cannot rely on morality and reason alone. He must resort to an attitude of religious beseeching of the Kingdom, to a hopeful expectation that it will come. The notion of redemption thus developed is simultaneously active and expectant: it motivates the individual to act in order to bring forth a promise made but not guaranteed.

Hence, the condition of possibility for redemption is the simultaneity of history and Utopia, of the real and the ideal. This unity, however, is dynamic and is relative to the individual ability to bring it into existence; in other words, it depends on the individual ability to transcend both the narrow confines of historical, rational existence and the chiliastic passion of the antihistorical eschaton. There is no possibility of redemption without the individual who takes up this task under the commandment of a yearning for renovation that is inscribed in the very creation as the desire to improve, to seek betterment. Inspired by this view of salvation in the here and now, Roth and his contemporaries emphasize the importance of the present moment in assuming the redemptive condition. The present is crucial in linking up the inherited past and the desired future into a whole that uplifts historical existence to the transcendent realm, while also preserving its concrete, mundane form. As a result of this fusion, an exchange takes place between that which was inherited and that which is desired: we are not simply the passive receivers of a given past, just as we are not totally autonomous in regard to shaping our future however we want. Instead, we have the moral ability to infuse a redemptive expectation into what we inherit from the past while also informing our future expectation with the genetic makeup of the inherited past, so to speak. Thus for Roth, the order of redemption allows for a shift in understanding both the past and the future: instead of a passively inherited past and an actively desired future, it proposes a desired past shaped by the moral demand for redemption and an inherited future influenced by the legacy of the past.

Therefore, history acquires a unique status in the tradition of early twentieth-century Central European Jewish thinking, including in Roth’s own writing. This is because the concept of redemption places at its center the surpassing of the opposition between the restorative and prospective character of salvation, by virtue of which future deliverance is relative to a restitution of the past mediated through the values of the present. History, understood as the repository of the valuable tradition that needs to be actualized in the utopian hope for salvation, represents for Roth no longer a strictly descriptive science of irreversible events. Instead, it becomes intricately knit into the normative selection and modeling that the present requires in order to answer the demands expressed by its hope for future redemption. By not extricating salvation from history (as traditional utopians and mystics but also historians, albeit for the opposite reasons, have done) and instead making it into a principle of historical development thanks to its capacity to mobilize the individual toward the attainment of the promised renewal, redemption becomes for Roth synonymous with the temporal meaningfulness of human existence.

Roth’s quest for redemption is also a quest for a synthetic principle capable of harmonizing contradictory notions, such as history and Utopia, past and future, action and expectation, certainty and possibility. The space in which redemption unfolds, at the intersection of conceptually opposing terms, requires an unconventional understanding of notions such as individual and collective identity, or society and history. It is a particularity of Roth’s own writing that certain realities take on both a historical, real but also figurative, allegorical sense. His use of certain literary loci, such as the East European Jew, Austria, or Germany, is often allegorical, symbolizing higher notions, such as salvation, memory, or damnation, but at the same time denotative, explicating historically concrete social and political situations. This bifocal perspective on reality can only be explained circularly: in building the conditions of possibility for surmounting the opposition between reality and imagination, Roth’s logic of redemption treats them already as the same thing. Because of its totalizing character, the idea of redemption has no moment of inception: it was always already there, acting retrospectively. One has to take a leap of faith in order to see it. It is probably for this reason that many critics have such a hard time placing Roth’s literary world in a temporal or narrative category: it is simultaneously no longer and not yet, actual and possible, historical and utopian, real and fictional.

Although the notion of redemption developed by Roth’s generation has not been addressed in a unitary fashion in the Roth scholarship, there are studies that touch on separate aspects of this problem. In her 1984 Von der Würde des Unscheinbaren: Sinnerfahrung bei Joseph Roth (On the Grandeur of the Inconspicuous: The Experience of Meaning in Joseph Roth’s Work), Esther Steinmann demonstrates the connection between Roth’s religious imagination and the Chasidic religious experience, an experience characterized by an ambiguous combination of conservative tradition and messianic expectation, but she relegates this aspect to Roth’s theological affinities with Judaism and not to a larger movement of Judaic renaissance rooted in the notion of renovation and redemption. Two decades later in 2004, Almuth Hammer analyzed in her study Erwählung erinnern: Literatur als Medium jüdischen Selbstverständnisses (Remembering Divine Election: Literature as a Medium of Jewish Self-Identity) the issue of Roth’s generation’s return to Judaic traditions, pointing out that this return should be interpreted not as an embrace of the actual Judaic traditions but instead as an interpretation of tradition in the context of modernity (im Kontext der Moderne) (208).² However, Hammer fails to provide a detailed explanation of this process with convincing evidence drawn from Roth’s work itself, instead devoting most of her study to an analysis of the abstract dialectical relationship between modernity and tradition.

Although Roth’s messianic imagination and his interest in a religious reformulation of the idea of Utopia have been mentioned, albeit in passing, by some critics, such as Markus May and Bernd Oei, not all believe that Roth’s fiction points to a better world, a Utopia to be found either in fiction or at the end of all times. Wolfgang Müller-Funk, for instance, argues that for Roth Messianismus … eher fremd war ‘Messianism was rather alien’ (Joseph Roth 195). Instead, Roth appears to these critics as a disenchanted, skeptical, and antiutopian writer for whom no other world is possible except in death or, ironically, in fiction, as Blanke, Hüppauf, and Butler argue. There are also interpreters who place Roth’s messianism in the context of his hostility toward the historical present and toward modernity in order to demonstrate that for Roth redemption is possible only through the negation of reality, die Erlösung aus dem Exil der Geschichte ‘the redemption from the exile of history’ (Sebald 91). The drive toward permanence, toward tradition, is understood by these interpreters as a push outside history and into the past. Even when redemption is anticipated as something yet to happen, it is often seen as a restoration of an old order, of a golden age, a backward-looking Utopia (rückwärts gewandte Utopie), as Martha Wörschnig, drawing on Ernst Bloch or possibly on a 1930 Stefan Zweig review of Roth’s novel Hiob (Job), memorably put it (90). However, what these critics fail to account for is Roth’s persistent interest in the future-oriented correction of the state of the modern world through a here and now solution. The pull of the mythical past is counterbalanced by a counterforce in the opposite direction, toward the future, the present acting like the fulcrum. As the present study demonstrates, this present is the time of redemption. Not only Roth but also other thinkers of his generation, such as Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, and Buber, have been equally captivated by the power of the present to offer solutions, echoing thus—in a secular fashion—the Chasidic idea of redemption as an event of everyday existence. It should be noted that Fritz Hackert is nonetheless one of the first critics to mention, although briefly, the tight connection between Roth’s religious imagination and his penchant toward fabulous writing and Chasidism.

Probably the critic who stands most closely to the present study is Claudio Magris, whose monograph Lontano da dove, widely available in its German translation as Weit von wo (Away from Where), elaborates most convincingly Roth’s connection with the Chasidic world and with Martin Buber’s philosophy. Magris emphasizes Roth’s constant dialogue with a Chasidic storytelling and mystical tradition, one that is fundamentally skeptical about history but also about the possibility of a final, firm absolution from history. In this respect, Magris argues, Roth comes close to Yiddish literature, which finds a refuge from history in tradition, in the world of the shtetl, albeit a fictional refuge. For Roth, the function of literature is to create a space in which both the organic connection with the traditional world and the fulfillment of the individual desire to exist in history coexist harmoniously, a space of ambivalence that opens up the realm of possibilities beyond the constraints of place and time. Roth’s predilection for the parable, for a form of storytelling that transcends the coordinates of the fictional chronotope, stems, Magris contends, from his affinity with the Chasidic tale, whose role is to transfigure reality into the realm of the possible (267).

In Magris’s view, Roth’s indebtedness to Chasidism resides in his geschichts-feindliche, religiöse Individualismus ‘antihistorical religious individualism’ (287). In this sense, even Roth’s emphasis on classicism and nobility are an expression of a typical Jewish rejection of history, which is always seen as a history of decay and of exile. This explains why the position outside of history, the melancholy contemplation, comes naturally to Roth, who consciously chooses der Standpunkt ‘außerhalb’ ‘the external point of view’ or der Standpunkt der Metageschichte des ‘Golus’, des jüdischen Exils ‘the metahistorical point of view of the Golus, of the Jewish exile’ (91). From this position, the flow of history appears as a narrative of decay and defeat, similar to Benjamin’s view. Magris points out, however, that Roth does not either share or oppose Benjamin’s messianic impulse in his evaluation of history. If Utopia appears anywhere, it is in the form of the Utopie einer Vergangenheit ‘Utopia of a past’ that cannot replace the present anymore of a Mythos des Nicht-mehr-Möglichen ‘Myth of the no-longer-possible’ (20).

On the other hand, Magris demonstrates how important life in the present and the joys of simple existence are for Roth, as if to counterbalance the drive outside of history into myth. This attitude finds its expression in the Chasidic pietas: Freude anstatt des erlösenden Leids, Demut statt der titanischen Utopie ‘Joy instead expiatory suffering, humility instead of titanic Utopia’ (179). Magris emphasizes the fact that Roth rejects the apocalyptical Messiah of the hereafter and embraces the here and now of everyday life in the destinies of the common people such as Mendel Singer of Hiob, who was a simple man. The redemptive act, Magris argues, is in the catharsis of storytelling itself, which unites the storyteller and the audience, as the Chasidic tradition suggests (180). He insists that Roth manages to achieve in the realm of literature the apparently impossible synthesis between the escape from the misery of history and the return to history as the inevitable condition of everyday humanity.

And yet for Magris, Roth’s search for redemption rests solely in the realm of literature. It is a fictional construct that is unavoidably bound to the melancholy of the absence of reality, a literary strategy to survive the disaster of history. However, given how complexly intertwined Roth’s notions of literature and reality are, it is hard to circumscribe Roth’s world entirely to the realm of the imagination. For him, the fictional world is real to the same extent that all reality is just a fictional projection. His own empirical self-staging (Selbstinszenierung) bears testimony to the fact that he made a conscious effort to treat his created world as real, to bring it down to earth. For this reason, the idea of redemption needs to be considered in its capacity to reconcile these contradictions and provide a solution to the conflict between reality and fiction upon which Magris’s argument is predicated. By understanding that the idea of redemption as restoration, reparation, reformation and the recovery of lost harmony, as Löwy puts it (2), encompasses the entirety of life, possible and real, it becomes apparent that its aim is to surmount the conflicts between history and Utopia, object and subject, past and future. From the point of view of redemption, the conventional opposition between fiction and reality has no meaning, being simply the result of a corrupt, fallen consciousness in need of renovation.

Naturally, this does not mean that this idea of redemption always has a direct application in real life, although many of its proponents would argue differently. Especially in the field of politics, the idea of a recovery of lost harmony raises many questions about its ability to find a concrete expression but also to avoid any ideological contagions with the ideologies of radical renovation of human nature that shaped the fate of the twentieth century. For this reason, the present study often points out that some of Roth’s ideas indeed reside in the realm of the literary imagination. And yet, there is an immediate impact of the idea of redemption on reality and an appeal to the individual to alter one’s relationship with the world. The crucial point of the philosophy of redemption discussed here is the reenthronement of the individual moral mind in history. Whether we are talking about Utopia, salvation, justice, or memory, the thinkers analyzed here emphasize the importance of reuniting the individual with the world, of obtaining that encounter, that authentic relationship of which Buber speaks in I and Thou. And since any such deeper connection involves the responsibility of an I for a You (Buber, I and Thou 66), it follows that the individual must cease to delegate the responsibility for the world to ready-made, mechanistic categories of reason, politics, and religion and assume the moral responsibility for the world. Maybe this appeal to moral responsibility for the world is the practical message couched in the idea of redemption. Viewed in this light, Roth’s work can be interpreted as a guide to a better world, as a call to responsibility and moral wakefulness in a modern era of individual disengagement from tradition and from the countenance of the You (Buber, I and Thou 92).

It is the purpose of the present study to demonstrate that Roth’s idea of redemption is part of a larger generational effort to articulate a notion of redemption that can resolve the contradictions of modern consciousness and bring about an eon of harmony in all realms of life: political, epistemological, moral-religious, and psychological. It is also characteristic of the members of this generation that they found inspiration for this idea of redemption in the Judaic, especially Chasidic, concept of religious salvation as a messianism of everyday existence. By using this notion of salvation, these thinkers are able to pose the possibility of a Utopia of the here and the now, to redeem history but also to let it continue, to find a middle way between the messianic end of history and the unavoidably historical dimension of human existence. In this sense, the present work demonstrates precisely how this synthesis takes shape in Roth’s work and how it relates to similar concepts formulated by other thinkers: Utopia, hope, redemption, this-worldly miracle.

Roth’s Ambivalence, Its Critical Reception, and Some Observations of Methodological Nature

Writing a critical study devoted to Joseph Roth’s work is, from the very beginning, an uphill battle. It is as if the work itself resists any attempts at clear-cut categorizations and conceptualizations, in spite of the fact that it remains accessible to a wide readership. As literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki once humorously remarked, Ob er [Roth] es wollte oder nicht: Er hat es seinen Lesern immer leicht- und seinen Interpreten oft schwergemacht ‘Whether he [Roth] intended it or not, he always made it easy for his readers and hard for his critics’ (Die besten Romane von Joseph Roth). A possible explanation for this interpretative difficulty might reside with Roth’s own hostility toward literary criticism and theory in general, although he himself penned many literary reviews in the German-language press of the interwar years. As Soma Morgenstern recalls in his book of memoirs Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende: Erinnerungen (Joseph Roth’s Flight and End: Memoirs), Roth was from very early on dismissive of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, of which he said he could read only two pages, and of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy, which to him seemed too German (80). How Roth conceived of literature is somewhat difficult to gauge, but based on a 1935 letter to his friend and compatriot Stefan Zweig, one might argue that writing was for Roth a very practical undertaking: Writing is a terrestrial thing, and, from a ‘metaphysical’ vantage point, is in no way different from shoemaking (Joseph Roth: A Life 433). As for reading literature, Roth did not make a secret out the fact that he did not see much point in it, especially for a writer. According to Géza von Cziffra’s memoir Der heilige Trinker: Erinnerungen an Joseph Roth (The Holy Drinker: Memories of Joseph Roth), when asked about his literary tastes, Roth often quoted Karl Kraus’s aphorism Ein Dichter, der liest, ist wie ein Kellner, der ißt ‘a writer who reads is like a waiter who eats’ (105).

And yet Roth consumed literature, reviewed it in the press of the time (he lived on the income from his journalism most of his adult life), and had clear opinions about what he liked and disliked. His admiration for French literature is well known, as exemplified by his opinion of Marcel Proust: Bei Marcel Proust ist mir der Knopf aufgegangen ‘I had a revelation with Marcel Proust’ (Morgenstern 103), while his dislike of German literature is also well documented. An illustration of this is provided by Morgenstern himself, who recalls in his memoir the details of the encounter between Roth and another great Austrian writer, Robert Musil. When Musil expressed admiration for the novel Hiob and for the authenticity of the main character, Mendel Singer, Roth replied caustically that this might be impressive for a "goy such as Musil, not a Jew such as himself. As for his opinion of Musil, Roth quickly dismissed him as a German writer, too abstract and convoluted. How can the contradiction between Roth the practical writer who—allegedly—did not read other writers and Roth the corrosive and opinionated critic be explained? And how can we explain the fact that even Roth’s harsh judgments changed depending on mood or context, as Morgenstern remembers: Roth [ist] der einzige Schriftsteller … der jedem Gespräch über Literatur ausweicht, aber gern über Schriftsteller spricht und von einem zum andern Mal vergißt, wie er sie einschätzt ‘Roth [is] the only writer … who avoids any talk about literature but likes to talk about writers and forgets his opinion of them from one time to another’ (81)? Critics have provided various, often conflicting explanations, but that is not uncommon for anyone undertaking an interpretation of Roth’s work. These are just several instances of what many commentators have called Roth’s structural inconsistency or ambivalence," which is why any attempt at a systematical analysis of his work is bound to a partial, often relative validity. It is also the case with the present study. As Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler beautifully concludes in his analysis of Roth’s reception in the literary history and with an allusion to Roth’s study Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews), Roths Werk ist in keinem Kapitel daheim; es ist auf der Wanderschaft ‘Roth’s work does not reside in any chapter; it is on the move’ (Schmidt-Dengler 32). But the difficulty of obtaining a unitary picture of Roth’s work is not necessarily an inconvenience. The fact that it resists interpretation (sich der Greifbarkeit entzieht) can be seen as a source of continued creativity and fresh explanations, always compelling to new interpretations (immer zu neuer Formulierung zwingt (Schmidt-Dengler 32).

The lack of critical consensus is augmented in Roth’s case by the author’s sinuous intellectual and historical trajectory and by his own ambiguous self-positioning in multiple contexts. The question who was the real Joseph Roth? is often and justifiably asked by a critical audience accustomed to modern, clear-cut, and unequivocal national, political, and religious identities, an audience for whom hybrid or context-bound identities are highly uncommon. Was Roth the Galician Jew, the German socialist, the Austrian legitimist, or the Catholic thinker? But this ambiguity cannot be said to be the result of temporal distance alone. To his contemporaries Roth was a puzzle as well, as demonstrated by the famous episode of Roth’s funeral when, as David Bronsen explains in his seminal Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Joseph Roth: A Biography), Roth’s friends gathered to pay their final respects: the monarchists and the communists, the Jews and the Catholics, each one claiming Roth as one of their own (602). There is plenty of evidence that Roth was aware of this ambiguity and that he even intentionally cultivated it. Whether he did it for artistic effect or indeed as the result of a form of self-understanding that transcended the traditional categories of the self is another matter of debate among the critics. Roth’s own 1926 self-description as a Frenchman from the East, a Humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a Jewish intelligence, an actual revolutionary bears testimony to the multiple facets of his identity, an identity that simultaneously puzzles and stimulates the imagination (Joseph Roth: A Life 88).

Still, this ambiguity might have been more easily bypassed by literary criticism had it been simply a question of personal identity and not so interlocked with Roth’s literary work. But Roth stands out through the original (and almost postmodern) interweaving of private life, social persona, and auctorial self, as Peter Wilhelm Jansen points out: Bei kaum einem anderen Romancier dieses Jahrhunderts sind Leben und Werk so eng mit einander verflochten, so dicht verzahnt ‘There is no other [twentieth-] century novelist for whom life and work are so closely intertwined, so tightly interlocked’ (Weltbezug und Erzählhaltung 21). Moreover, the complex interconnections between Roth’s fiction, journalism, and essayistic nonfiction make it doubly difficult to draw conclusions about realities that inhabit multiple, often shifting registers. First of all, as Reinhard Baumgart observes, fast alles, was er geschrieben hat, ob Reisebericht, Polemik oder erzählende Prosa, bleibt immer durchsichtig auf den, der schreibt ‘the author [Roth] remains visible in almost everything he wrote, whether travel report, polemic, or narrative prose’ (Drei Ansichten 330). There is an intentional presence of Roth’s personal voice in almost everything he writes, and the reason for this is that he sees literature in a very practical sense, as a tool used by the author to touch, to entertain, but also to awaken the moral instincts of the reader. Not only does Roth’s personal voice speak often in his fiction, breaking down the barriers between author and narrator, but this voice itself is also somehow fictionalized, staged, so that the author himself becomes in a way another character. According to Thomas Bauer, Roth selects which auctorial voice he makes present in his fiction depending on which self-identification he chooses: Wenn man Roth liest, liest man, wie er sich in das, was er schreibt, einmischt und welches Konzept von Persönlichkeit er einmischt ‘In reading Roth, one reads how he interferes with what he writes and what concept of personality he mixes in’ (445).

In addition to allowing his personal voice and biographical details to transpire in his fiction, Roth also fictionalizes his own life to the point where reality becomes hardly distinguishable from story. In this sense, Steinmann is right to argue that Roth [sah] auch sein eigenes Leben als Legende, in dem Dichtung und Wahrheit, Fiktion und Wirklichkeit ununterscheidbar ineinanderflossen ‘Roth saw his own life as a legend as well, in which literature and truth, fiction and reality undistinguishably coalesced’ (… ein Mann von Ehre 59). As his biographer David Bronsen points out, Roth’s own autobiographical accounts were a mix of fiction and reality in the sense that Roth always tried to create partially fictive narratives around his life, origins, and family. He tried to cast himself as a character in his own life, so to speak, which explains why some aspects of his biography are not clear to this day. There exist several accounts, sometimes contradictory, that testify to the author’s mythomaniacal tendencies (Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie 487). As Hermann Linden writes,

Joseph Roth trug im Leben viele Masken. Gerne erschien er als Realist, als Skeptiker, ja sogar als arroganter Zyniker. Auch sahen wir ihn, der zuerst ganz links stand, später rechts, sahen ihn, als Monarchisten, vorübergehend sogar im Banne des Katholizismus, als Demütigen, Traditionsgläubigen, und am Ende seines Lebens sehen wir ihn wieder in der Maske des Anfangs. (Tage mit Joseph Roth 103)

Joseph Roth wore many masks in life. He liked to act as a realist, as a skeptic, even as an arrogant cynic. We also saw him first quite on the left, then on the right, then as monarchist, temporarily even under the spell of Catholicism, wearing the mask of humility and traditionalism, and at the end of his life we see him once again wearing the mask of the beginning.

While many agree that Roth wore many masks, the question about the justification of his masquerading still remains a matter of dispute. Is it, as Katharina Ochse points out, the expression of Roth’s own ambiguous dealing with his identity as a Jew living in an anti-Semitic environment? Or is it an instance of creativity that stretches beyond the literary realm, as is suggested through Jansen’s idea of autofiction (Autofiktion), according to which Roth creates a fictional universe that he subsequently assumes to be real? Jansen explains this process as a form of fictional identity constitution that bears in turn upon the constitution of fiction itself, since die Erfüllung des Ich … nicht tatsächlich sein kann und nur möglich ist im Fiktiven ‘the fulfillment of the ego … cannot happen in reality and is possible only in the fictional world’ (Der autofiktive Ezähler 372). For Wolfgang Müller-Funk, the existence of a circularity between Roth’s biography and his fiction brings evidence to his work being autoreferential (selbstbezüglich) rather than mimetic (mimetisch) (Joseph Roth 30). As a result of this autoreferentiality, there is no clear distinction between fictional and nonfictional reality, which explains why for Roth literary concepts such as documentary writing and fictional writing (Dichtung) have no meaning. By rejecting the categories of literary theory, the distinctions between author and narrator, between objective reality and created reality, Roth reaffirms in the 1929 article Es lebe der Dichter! (Long live the writer!) the pragmatic nature of literature: Es gibt kein ‘Gesetz,’ keine ‘Norm,’ keine ‘Regel.’ Es gibt nur schlechte Autoren und gute ‘There is no law, no norm, no rule. There are only bad and good authors’ (Werke 3: 46).

The implications of Roth’s original conception of fictional and empirical reality are also felt in the circularity of his fictional and nonfictional writing. If all observation of reality is already fictionalized, then all fiction bears in it a close connection with observable reality; it is, so to speak, documentary, argues Roth in Es lebe der Dichter!: Auch ‘erfinden’ heißt ‘beobachten’, gesteigertes ‘Finden’. Es lebe der Dichter! Er ist immer ‘dokumentarisch’! ‘Also to invent means to observe, augmented discovery. Long live the writer! He is always documentary!’ (Werke 3: 46). As a result Roth takes great liberties with his journalistic, essayistic, and fictional writing, which he understands as a unitary endeavor or, in Jürgen Heizmann’s words, as "das eine, einzige Buch, das seinen gesamten Kosmos enthält" ‘the one, the only book, that contains his entire cosmos’ (Joseph Roth 11). Ideas, characters, themes, situations, and sometimes entire sentences appear to migrate from nonfiction to fiction and then back into non-fiction but half fictionalized (Ochse 11). Words that belong to the reporter Roth appear in the mouths of his characters in the novels. As Reinhard Baumgart points out, der Aggregatzustand ‘Fiktion’ lässt sich von dem Aggregatzustand ‘Feuilleton’ oder ‘Reportage’ in Roths Prosa durchaus nicht klar unterscheiden ‘in Roth’s prose, the state of aggregation fiction is in no way clearly distinguishable from the state of aggregation feuilleton or reportage’ (Auferstehung 44). The vast continuity in Austrian themes, characters, and issues among Roth’s fictional works has even prompted Herman Kesten to refer to a veritable "comédie autrichienne" (101) similar to Balzac’s comédie humaine. And yet in spite of these commonalities, Roth does not create a consistent whole, a fictional-documentary world without fissure. The characters may share the same names and the situations may seem identical from one work to another, but often a closer inspection reveals inconsistencies that question the very assumption of continuity or sameness. Roth frequently undermines realities that he himself creates, continuously challenging the reader’s preconceived notions of identity, temporality, and causality. As Scheible observes, der Konstruktion seiner ‘comédie humaine’ vermeidet Roth Erstarrung durch Eindeutigkeit ‘in the construction of his comédie humaine, Roth avoids the immobility brought by unambiguousness’ (Joseph Roth: Mit einem Essay 86).

Roth’s ambivalent notion of identity is structural to his writing, for which reason his work does not lend itself very easily to categorizations or interpretations that employ the standard categories of the narrative discourse or genre theory. Categories such as author, narrator, and character, person and persona, or reality and fiction are ambiguously merged and constantly undermined, forcing the interpreter into constantly new territories. The novels lead to the feuilletons, the feuilletons to the biography, and the biography to letters and journalism and finally back to the novels. As Irmgard Wirtz notes, since the opposition between reality and fiction is not a point of departure in the interpretation of Roth’s work, one should adopt a dialogical model of explanation, one that sees all the distinctive elements in a dialogue and relationship of mutual influence. She finds this approach particularly useful in the analysis of the relationship between Roth’s early reports and his late historical fiction (118). The present study engages with Roth’s work in a similar fashion. It makes use of various elements of his writings, including his novels, short stories, correspondence, reportage, polemics, reviews, and newspaper commentaries, in order to shed a new light on his fictional work. In doing this, it treats these elements as part of a literary whole that is, however, unstable and in constant need of contextual interpretation. This instability accounts for the methodological liberties that this study takes in the holistic treatment of Roth’s fiction, nonfiction, and correspondence.

The present study is structured into five chapters: the first chapter, devoted to Roth’s pivotal preoccupation with the idea of redemption in the context of a wider generational return to Judaism among the secular Jewish intellectuals of his time and focused mainly on his nonfictional writings; the second chapter, focused on the major early novels written before Job (Perlefter, written in 1929, is not treated here);³ the third chapter, devoted to Roth’s fiction of direct religious inspiration; the fourth chapter, which explores Roth’s fiction of historical inspiration; and the fifth chapter, dealing with the particular case of the novel The Tale of the 1002nd Night. The idea of redemption is analyzed through its negative manifestations in the early novels; in its positive, explicit form in the late ones; and in its ironic form in the novel The Tale of the 1002nd Night. This study does not follow the stylistic convention of using the gender-neutral pronominal construction he/she for the simple reason that it may get in the way of comprehending an often abstract and difficult content. As a nonnative English speaker, I consider the use of the generic pronoun he less awkward, with the mention that the choice of he is purely conventional, being interchangeable with she. For the most important sources in German I used existing translations when available, whereas for the sources of secondary importance and for those for which no translation is available I used my own translation.

Notes

1. In such utopias the guide explains the structure of the society and thereby the significance of the behavior being observed. Hence, the behavior of society is presented as rationally motivated (Frye, Varieties 323–47).

2. Unless otherwise noted, the translations from the original foreign language belong to the author.

3. Perlefter is not only unfinished but is also reconstructed from Roth’s Nachlass . As Rosenfeld points out, the novel, first published in 1978, was reconstructed like a jigsaw puzzle from various fragments. For this reason, it lacks unity and reads more like an exercise in the technique of the literary portrait. Although Rosenfeld dismisses it as a lusterless book ( Understanding 37), the portraits of the two main protagonists, Perlefter and Bidak, are wonderfully chiseled and can easily fit into any of Roth’s major works.

Chapter 1

The Promise of Redemption and the Meaning of

History: A Central European Jewish Synthesis

In order to understand the particular ethos of Roth’s literary—fictional and nonfictional—thinking, it is important to situate him within a historical-biographical context. More important than the narrow, personal context of his intellectual and artistic development is the wider context of which Roth was part. Hailing from the then preponderantly Jewish small town of Brody, in eastern Galicia on the outskirts of Austria-Hungary, Roth grew up in a Jewish middle-class family, raised by his mother’s side of the family. His father’s exact origins and the circumstances of his separation from the rest of the family have been the subject of some speculation due in large part to Roth’s own conflicting accounts (Sternburg 27). However, Roth’s most important biographer, David Bronsen, maintains that Roth’s father was a salesman who was forced to leave his family by an early onset of mental illness (Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie 42). His father’s absence as well as the almost fated return later in Roth’s life of mental illness through the person of his wife, Friedl, would affect Roth deeply and leave a mark on his literary work as well. Although he sometimes claimed to have had an underprivileged childhood, his biographers argue, relying on evidence of family accounts and pictures, that his mother ensured him a relatively sheltered life and offered him the educational opportunities that most middle-class Jewish children of the time enjoyed (Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie 57–58). In school the young Roth studied in German and was introduced to Hebrew, but at home he spoke Yiddish and German. Although his mother’s side of the family was fairly assimilated, he was exposed early on to Orthodox Judaism through his maternal grandfather and had a connection to Chasidism through his father’s side of the family. Later in life, Roth’s declared affinity with this Eastern Jewish world would define his identity as a writer.

After graduating from high school in 1913, Roth began his studies at the University of Lemberg (Lviv), in the provincial capital, where he was exposed to the political conflicts dominating the Austrian world in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I. Lemberg at the time was one of the most important centers of Jewish urban life in Eastern Europe, but the city was also claimed by the other two major ethnic groups of the region, the Poles and the Ukrainians. Its ethnic diversity would later in 1924 make Roth characterize Lemberg as a colorful speck in Eastern Europe and a kleine Filiale der großen Welt ‘small branch office of the wide world’ (Werke 2: 286–87). The burgeoning nationalist movement increased the competition among these groups and polarized them in their attitude toward the central authority of the Austrian state. Separatists clashed with loyalists, and Roman Catholics clashed with Greek Catholics and the Jews (Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie 113). Within the Jewish community itself there were various groups competing for hegemony, including assimilated German-speaking representatives of the Haskalah tradition, Zionist nationalists, and also Orthodox and Chasidic Jews who had recently moved into the city from the eastern borderlands. Roth, who identified himself with the German culture at this point, was privy to all these clashes and even attended the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913, although later in his career he would criticize the Zionist movement in extremely harsh terms. In 1914 Roth began his studies at the University of Vienna in the German department. The period between his arrival in Vienna and his departure in 1916 for the Eastern Front during World War I is a period of material struggles but also of great intellectual stimulation for the small-town young writer, who experienced the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Vienna even during a time of war mobilization (Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie 149).

Roth’s image at the time was, in the eyes of his contemporaries, that of a person seeking assimilation into the German culture and Western society in general. David Bronsen reproduces in his Roth biography the words of Heinz Kindermann, a former assistant from the University of Vienna who remembers the young student Roth as an alacritous speaker of educated Hochdeutsch: Unser Deutsch hatte einen wienerischen Klang, Roth dagegen sprach ein betontes Hochdeutsch ‘Our German had a Viennese ring to it, whereas Roth, to the contrary, spoke an emphatic High German’ (Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie